Legislative Preview
– Layla Kelly, Senior, Homestead High School
In early January, lawmakers convened for the beginning of the 2024 session of the Indiana General Assembly. While hundreds of bills were filed this session, below are several bills that would directly impact the lives of women and girls in Hoosier communities, including their healthcare, personal safety, and economic equality.
House Bill 1040: Medical forensic examination kits. HB 1040, authored by Representative Sheila Klinker, aims to make progress on Indiana’s crisis of backlogged sexual assault kits. The bill mandates additional oversight throughout the testing process, including requiring that law enforcement agencies submit all data on kits to the state. Also, victims registered for notifications on their kit would be notified within 30 days of any update. The reforms included in this bill are important for ensuring the personal safety of women throughout the state, especially as Indiana has at least 6,600 untested kits as of 2022.
House Bill 1125: Maternal health. In 2022, Indiana had the third-highest maternal mortality rate in the country. HB 1125, authored by Representative Vanessa Summers, sets forth a program to address this issue. This bill requires the Indiana Department of Health to create a program that awards grants to community-based programs that aim to improve maternal health. Increasing funding for these programs is key to improving healthcare for new moms.
House Bill 1293: Family domestic violence court. HB 1293 is a bipartisan bill authored by Fort Wayne Representatives Kyle Miller and Chris Judy. After the 2020 Women and Girls Study, the Women’s Fund began an initiative to decrease domestic violence in Allen County through a domestic violence problem-solving court. This type of alternative justice aims to address the root causes of domestic violence. HB 1293 officially codifies this problem-solving alternative into state law, which is crucial to ensure that the court can continue its essential work in decreasing domestic violence in Allen County.
House Bill 1266: Freedom of conscience in health care. This bill allows healthcare providers to deny patients any services that would contradict their religious, moral, or ethical beliefs without referring patients to another provider who would provide the service. This bill is especially significant for women because it would likely disproportionately limit access to reproductive healthcare like birth control. 26% of women in Allen County already do not access healthcare because of cost, and forcing women to seek new healthcare providers may increase this figure.
Senate Bill 2: Child care. SB 2, with 14 authors and coauthors, is a bipartisan effort to address the growing problems with child care in Indiana. This bill reforms child care access in several key ways. It expands eligibility for federal child care assistance to families with a household income lower than 85% of Indiana’s median household income and households of child care providers. The bill also expands the On My Way Pre-K voucher program to children of child care providers. Additionally, the bill mandates a third-party evaluation of existing child care regulations and compensation for child care providers. These provisions are significant for working mothers, especially because single mothers need child care to work but often struggle to afford it. The majority of child care providers in Indiana are women, so including them in these programs also strengthens the economic status of Hoosier women.
Senate Bill 128: Human sexuality instruction. Indiana is one of 22 states that does not mandate sexual education in schools beyond instruction on AIDS and HIV. If schools do choose to provide sexual education, existing state law requires the material to promote abstinence-only. SB 128 further restricts sexual education by requiring any material to be approved by the school board and published on the school website. This bill presents an additional barrier for schools trying to provide students with sexual education, which is highly important as children mature into adults. This bill is especially pertinent to female students because they face the possibility of becoming pregnant as teenagers without instruction on contraception and reproductive health in general.
Senate Bill 203: Sales tax exemption for menstrual discharge collection devices. This session, Senator Shelli Yoder is persisting in her goal of removing the tax on period products through SB 203. Period products are a medical necessity for menstruating women, and women cannot go to work if they do not have access to these products. The 2020 Women and Girls Study found that 24% of Allen County women working full-time earn less than $25,000 annually. Taxing period products is an additional and unnecessary financial burden on women. Repealing this tax is an important first step in addressing period poverty and, on a larger scale, remedying economic gender inequity in Indiana, as this tax disproportionately affects women.
Senate Bill 242: Medicaid pregnancy-related reimbursement rates. This bill significantly increases the Medicare reimbursement rate for pregnancy-related expenses, including prenatal care, delivery care, and postpartum care. These measures would increase access to important maternal healthcare services for low-income women, which would likely decrease maternal mortality.
These bills, along with many others, would affect the daily lives of women and girls in Allen County if passed into law. Hoosier women face numerous disparities, but several of these bills aim to make progress toward more gender-equitable communities.
What can I do to help girls expand their career horizons?
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